How silly?
Dahia al-Kahina, a leader of the Berbers in the Aures Mountains...a proud Jewess... who in the seventh century C.E. united a number of Berber tribes...According to the Tel Aviv University historian, Prof. Shlomo Sand...the queen's tribe and other local tribes that converted to Judaism are the main sources from which Spanish Jewry sprang
when, in fact, was the Jewish people invented, in Sand's view? At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people "retrospectively," out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people.
Sand argues that the most crucial demographic addition to the Jewish population of the world came in the wake of the conversion of the kingdom of Khazaria...Sand revives the hypothesis, which was already suggested by historians in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to which the Judaized Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.
"At the beginning of the 20th century there is a tremendous concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe - three million Jews in Poland alone," he says. "The Zionist historiography claims that their origins are in the earlier Jewish community in Germany, but they do not succeed in explaining how a small number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms could have founded the Yiddish people of Eastern Europe. The Jews of Eastern Europe are a mixture of Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward."
Prof. Israel Bartel has torn Sand apart, into little grains. And read Steve Plaut's article last year, pre-Sand.
Anyway, back to Kuzar the academic. Let him do the talking:-
To Dana Barnett manager of Israel Academia Monitor website
It came to my knowledge that an article of mine and an abstract of a lecture I intend to give in Canada on 7 October were presented on your English version of the homepage you manage, under the caption of [Haifa U, English] Ron Kuzar's support of the Palestinian discourse on the Right of Return. A lecture in Canada on October 7, and a new article.
I demand you take off this posting at once and post instead in the same place an apology for presenting baseless facts of my opinions.
There is nothing in this article and not in the abstract of any support in the Right of Return.
I expect this apology to stay on the website and to be circulated to the public in the same way as the original one was.
Ron Kuzar
Shlomo Sharan, Professor Emeritus, Psychology and Education, Tel-Aviv University, responds to Kuzar:-
Dear Professor Kuzar
If you do NOT wish to support the Palestinian's "Right to Return" it behooves you to say so, given the nature of the article that you published in
Discourse and Soiciety that is patently in support of the specious doctrine. However one tries to conceal opinions behind linguistic strategies, your article arouses the question of why you think it fools anyone. Moreover, if indeed you do not believe that the Arab Palestinians should have the right to enter Israel than you did a good job of misleading your readers.
In any case the responsibility is yours, not those who read your statements and react to its message, whether implicit or explicit. Communication is first and foremost the responsibility of the communicator. Under no circumstances would I, or any opther reader with self respect, issue an apology, unless you convince the journal in which your article was published that you retract the article due to lack of adequate clarity regarding the article's message.
Sincerely,
Read and judge.
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1 comment:
Prof. Israel Bartel has torn Sand apart, into little grains
Well, not really his whole thesis; rather, the "assertion, according to which an entire chapter in Jewish history was deliberately silenced for political reasons". If you actually read the article, what Bartel says is that the following - "the possibility that the millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews were actually descendants of the Khazars", "that conversions to Judaism had a major impact on Jewish history in the ancient period and in the early Middle Ages", "the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine)", is, well, a myth, etc - are well-accepted facts in the modern Jewish studies, with which Bartel clearly agrees. What he denies is that there was a deliberate silencing of these facts motivated by political reasons.
To which my response is: I am not an historian and have no intimate knowledge of, say, the common accepted facts in the modern Jewish historiography, but whatever Bartel may claim about it, on the ground the situation is different: most Israelis and Jews in general, if you ask them, will be very surprised to hear Bartel's assertions. For example, 99 out of 100 (if not more) Jews will swear that the Romans expelled the Jews from EY 2000 years ago, a belief about which Bartel says that "it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions. Important groups in the Jewish national movement expressed reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely." I imagine most Jews will also be ignorant of any serious contribution of, say, Khazars, to the Jewish genetic pool. So, again, whatever Bartel and his colleagues accept as givens in the Ivory Towers of their universities has yet to become the common knowledge among the Jewish masses.
Other Sand's assertions, such as , for example, that the Sephardic Jewry comes mostly from Berber converts, Bartel doesn't touch at all here. His tone suggest that he might well accept them; it's the claim that these views are deliberately silenced that he rejects!
I myself have hardly any opinion on Sand's claims. I lack enough info to judge their validity, but, frankly, I don't care that much: to me, the claim that, as the direct descendants of people that lived in EY 2000 years ago, we're justified in removing the more recent native population of this land is an abomination anyway, regardless of whether we're indeed genetically related to the Jews of old, if we were forcefully removed from the land or left on our own accord etc.
I am suspicious of Sand because he openly proclaims himself an ideologue and brings his political views as the main motivation behind his current research. This is a very perilous path and I won't be surprised if his work is indeed full of sloppy and unprofessional claims, but, again, I am in no position to judge that.
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